President Obama left office essentially squeaky clean in terms of scandals. He and his administration did a good job of governing with as much integrity as one might have as a politician.
However, and it is a big however, there are two things he should regret not doing while he was in office, because those two things might be his part in the downfall of our democracy and Republic.
The first is that he did very little to help down ballot Democrats throughout his presidency. So many state and local offices were flipped from Democrat to Republican during the eight years of his presidency. Losing all of those races allowed the Republicans to perform extreme gerrymandering after the counting of the census in 2010.
The large Republican gains of those eight years also allowed them to pass laws and policies to suppress non-white voters at the ballot box. They did this by purging voting roles, requiring signatures to match exactly on mail-in ballots, mandating accepting of only specific types of identification to be able to vote, decreasing the number of polling places in non-white neighborhoods, decreasing early voting days and hours, placed broken voting machines in non-white polling locales, and use WiFi/Internet connected modems which can be easily hacked.
Although the above has had huge impact on the voices of non-white voters being heard by those who make policies that affect them, we have the current administration because of the second thing President Obama should apologize for and regret as he reflects on his service to the country. This second thing was not reporting what the Russians were doing in our last election.
President Obama was briefed on the ways the Russians were working to influence the election. Those briefs included how the Russians might, and most likely would, be spreading propaganda via social media, that some politicians might be Russian compromised, and the Russians had the capability to actually manipulate the vote counts in precincts due to electronic voting manipulation. And yet President Obama said nothing to the public! Not. A. Single. Word! Apparently Mitch McConnell threatened to say Obama was interfering in the election if Obama went public. I will never understand why Obama kowtowed, as he often did, to McConnell and the Republicans.
Obama had plenty of trust by the people. Obama had excellent oratory skills. Obama had the bully pulpit of the Presidency. Yet he said and, for all practical purposes, appears to have done nothing. Because he said and did nothing, we have the current administration. If Obama would have been transparent about the Russians, they might have actually backed off a bit. If he had said something, we might have had a President Hillary Clinton and our country would not be in the quagmire we are in, and we could have fixed the Russian interference problem.
But alas, President Obama did not act, and alas, we have the current administration and the exponentially quickened decline of our democracy and Republic.
As a friend told me just today, we can’t dwell on what didn’t happen, we must dwell on eliminating the White House of the orange virus. I wholeheartedly agree!
We must concentrate on removing the current administration by voting early, voting mail-in/absentee ballot, or voting in person. We must show up at the polls in overwhelming numbers so we win blue from dog catcher to school boards to state houses to Congress to the White House. We can’t just want change without taking the action to effect the change.
If you don’t have your voting plan, you don’t have a minute to waste to develop your plan, then implement your plan.
See you at the ballot box!
Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man 